by Lara Zielin Conan O’Brien always had the same joke when he saw Pete
“Your handwriting looks like a ransom note. Seriously. It’s like someone tied a pen to a squirrel’s tail.” Levin, who wrote out the cue cards for Conan’s show before Conan moved to the West Coast to replace Jay Leno, can only shrug at the slight. “My printing still stinks and I’ve been doing this for nine years,” he says. Levin is one of only a handful of people in the country who work behind the scenes on television shows doing a job technology should have, by all accounts, replaced by now: hand-printing and holding cue cards. But Levin says there’s a surprising amount of job security in the marker-and-paper method of prompting actors for their lines. “A sketch comedy like Saturday Night Live doesn’t work with teleprompters because there are so many different people speaking to each other and walking around the set, and their lines have to follow them,” Levin says. And then there are people in the industry who simply prefer cue cards. “Donald Trump loves cue cards. He won’t read off anything else.” From Saturday Night Live to Conan to Jimmy Fallon to The Apprentice finale and more, Levin has worked his cue card magic for a plethora of shows. He’s an old hand. But one show, Saturday Night Live, never seems to get easier for him. “Doing SNL is nerve wracking, even now. Because if you drop a card and it hits the
Illustrations by Patricia Claydon
Levin (’96).
camera, the whole country is going to see it.” A recent skit for Jimmy Fallon had Levin holding more than 60 cue cards (the average is 30). “A character had a fanatical obsession with calendars. There were dancing cat calendars, extension cord calendars. My arm was shaking and I thought I was going to drop everything. I didn’t, but we’ve all had moments where we think it’s going to happen.” A film and video major at U-M, Levin took television production classes that piqued his interest in behind-the-scenes TV work. After graduation, a series of moves, and a string of bartending and restaurant jobs, Levin’s co-worker at the Session 73 restaurant in New York City, Wally Feresten, got Levin his first job at SNL. That was back in 2000. Now Feresten owns the cue-card company and Levin is a seasoned veteran. He hopes eventually it will be a steppingstone to breaking into sitcoms. “I love doing cue cards, but it’s not something I want to do forever,” he says. In the meantime, Levin is creating opportunities for himself in the restaurant business. He’s opened Professor Thoms’, a sports bar in the East Village, where a cue card signed by Michael Phelps after his 2008 SNL appearance hangs above a booth in the corner. Across the Hudson, Levin is also pouring himself into Papa Lima, his Zingerman’s-inspired sandwich shop. For now, he’ll keep working the cue cards, savoring the moments on set he loves the most. “When they play the music and the host comes out and there’s an audience cheering— that’s exhilarating.” S
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